Do High-Potential Employee Programs Work?
Despite its massive impact on a global scale, Twitter is a relatively small company. With five thousand employees, Twitter has to find the right potential leaders in their organization to invest in and promote. If Twitter chooses 5% of its workers to label as “high-potential”, they can spend millions of dollars on this set of 250 future leaders. Let’s take a look at what might happen inside a company like Twitter when putting its high potential program into place:
Sarah and Jennifer are two equally good employees managed by the same boss, Alex. One morning in June, after their performance reviews, Alex finds out Twitter labeled Sarah as a high-potential employee. Months later, the two women learn how their performance changed since their June review. Sarah’s performance skyrocketed, while Jennifer is doing just as well as before. Nothing changed around them except their boss knew about the high-potential label.
What happened?
High-potential programs in companies are built with good intentions. Firms wish to find talented people to invest in so they can put these employees on a fast track to leadership roles. These programs have a lot of power. What if they are simply creating self-fulfilling prophecies?
The Pygmalion effect
The Pygmalion effect describes a type of self-fulfilling prophecy that happens when other people’s expectations of us lead us to perform better. This self-fulfilling prophecy happens frequently in the workplace, but it was discovered first in elementary schools.1 In 1968, researchers told primary school teachers that some kids were “late bloomers” and others were not. Even though kids in both groups started at the same IQ level, the late bloomers blossomed.
References
1. Rosenthal, R., & Jacobson, L. (1968). Pygmalion in the classroom. The Urban Review, 3(1), 16-20.
2. Kierein, N. M., & Gold, M. A. (2000). Pygmalion in work organizations: A meta‐analysis. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 21(8), 913-928.
3. Jenner, H. (1990). The Pygmalion effect: The importance of expectancies. Alcoholism Treatment Quarterly, 7(2), 127-133.
4. Learman, L. A., Avorn, J., Everitt, D. E., & Rosenthal, R. (1990). Pygmalion in the nursing home: The effects of caregiver expectations on patient outcomes. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 38(7), 797-803.
5. Rosenthal, R. (1994). Interpersonal expectancy effects: A 30-year perspective. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 3(6), 176-179. & Harris, M. J., & Rosenthal, R. (2005). No more teachers’ dirty looks: Effects of teacher nonverbal behavior. Applications of Nonverbal Communication, 157-192.
6. Eden, D. (1990). Pygmalion without interpersonal contrast effects: Whole groups gain from raising manager expectations. Journal of Applied Psychology, 75(4), 394-398.
7. Biermeier-Hanson, B. (2012). Looking like a leader: an investigation into racial biases in leader prototypes. (Accession no. 1505574). [Doctoral dissertation, Wayne State University]. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing.
8. Meyers, M. C., & Van Woerkom, M. (2014). The influence of underlying philosophies on talent management: Theory, implications for practice, and research agenda. Journal of World Business, 49(2), 192-203.
About the Authors
Zad El-Makkaoui
Zad El-Makkaoui is an Organizational Psychologist, consultant, and people strategist. She is an associate at an organizational development consulting firm called gothamCulture. Her research interests include organizational change and the Future of Work. Zad has a MA in Social-Organizational Psychology from Columbia University and a BA in Psychology from the American University of Beirut. She is a certified Team Diagnostic Survey Advanced Practitioner and is a CIPD-certified L&D Associate.
Natasha Ouslis
Natasha is a behavior change consultant, writer, and researcher. She started her own workplace behavioral science consulting firm after working as a consultant at fast-growing behavioral economics companies including BEworks. Natasha is also finishing her PhD in organizational psychology at Western University, specializing in team conflict and collaboration, where she completed her Master of Science in the same field. She has a monthly column on workplace behavioral design in the Habit Weekly newsletter and is a Director and science translator at the nonprofit ScienceForWork.
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